Happy fun cloud will kill you now

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Have you seen the future? Have you felt its hot, Wi-Fi enabled breath on your nervous and sweaty neck? Don't worry: You will.

The future, in case you didn't already know, is all about the cloud. The cloud is, of course, that nebulous, supernatural high-tech storage space purportedly floating just above your head but which is really housed in an enormous server farm somewhere in Ohio, which will soon contain every possible bit of personal data about you -- your lifestyle, eating habits, music collection, photos, blood type, banking and drug preferences, hairstyle and sneeze fetishes, demographics about your kids, your dog, your therapist and your imaginary friend ... everything.

Have you heard about the cloud? I bet you have. The cloud is the new oxygen. The cloud is the new Bieber. The cloud is the Next Supreme Step toward a gloriously sanitized uber-paradise where all worries vanish, all wires come unplugged and the cackling world government manipulates the whole thing very, very carefully.

Watch and learn, awesome Blade Runner citizen of the future. We are told, in a swell Austrian dominatrix voiceover, that the Evos will communicate intimately via the cloud with ... your house. Together they will calibrate your entire world: set room temperatures, arrange wake-up calls, coordinate work schedules, choose playlists, turn on the coffeemaker, fluff pillows, run you a shower, smack the kids around for forgetting to brush their teeth for two full minutes. You name it, the car and the house do it together. But that's just the beginning.

The all-electric Evos will charge itself via a giant pad on the garage floor. The car will (of course) map out a perfect route to work (wait, the future isn't all telecommuting? Never mind), tell you your colleague is running late, massage your prostate, read you your emails (emails? Still?), check your heart rate and plan your vacation even as it satisfies your wife's tingling needs by running her favorite vibration pattern on her Hitachi because in the future, real human contact is, of course, totally gross.

And it all happens by way of the cloud. Which is, naturally, jacked straight into your brain by way of some sort of RFID chip implanted in your sub-cortex when you were a fetus, and now the world is one giant, pre-programmed wonderland of perfect first-world intercommunication (in the future, poor people don't exist, which is... thoughtful) that isn't the slightest bit disturbing or insulting to all that is feral and dirty and good.

Which brings us around to the main point at last. For does not all this cloud talk sound vaguely familiar? Does it not all point to ideas surrounding, say, impossibly perfect sci-fi utopias, Popular Mechanics magazine covers, geek psychobabble, all the way up to the grand dystopian idea known as the Singularity, that twinkling, apocalyptic moment when our top futurists say artificial intelligence will finally surpass human brainpower, humanity will eat itself alive and the world becomes one giant iPad 1,000? Of course it does.

Does it not, furthermore, remind us that we are nothing if not the balls-out most ridiculous and megalomaniacal species this side of the GOP inbreeding with the cast of "Jersey Shore"? You bet it does.

Let us now check in on a few untamed little facts. Did you know a recent study says we've only successfully recorded about 14 percent of all species on earth? That 86 percent remain completely unknown and, given the current, accelerated rates of extinction (thanks, humanity!) many never will be known, not ever?

Read that again: Entire species are being birthed and will die before we have a chance to catch a glimpse, before we're allowed a tiny taste of their secrets.

Did you know we've only seen, much less mapped, about three percent of the ocean floor, perhaps the most mysterious and uncanny landscape we can comprehend? How about the fact that we've glanced at about one millionth of one percent of the galaxy? That we still can't parse whale song? That we don't even know which dimension we actually inhabit?

This much we know for sure: We know but a fraction of what the hell we think we know, and to presume we have the slightest grasp on how it all works and how we can sync it all together in some sort of nifty jetpack zip-zip fingerswipe touchscreen wonderland is to proffer enough chutzpah to make God laugh.

Is it not a fantastic thing? Nearly every high-tech vision of the future is, by definition, rather embarrassingly lopsided, deformed, stripped of messy, feral nature. Futurists always manage to skip the eternal wildcard known as living organisms, those things that cannot, will not ever be controllable, understandable, reasonable. I think Don DeLillo nailed it, way back in "White Noise," when he wrote: "This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature."

Ah, but perhaps we're being a little hard on the poor pseudo-visionaries at Ford. Perhaps it's far too much to ask of any futurist anywhere to try and conjure a remotely accurate vision of tomorrow that contains all the appropriate free radicals: nature, sex, love, emotion, god, pain, fallibility, dancing, self destruction, stillness, the smell of your lover in the morning, the taste of a margarita on the beach at sunset.

Let's just say it outright: There will never be a Singularity, there will never be seamless tech integration and, mark my not-so-humble words, the nifty Ford Evos will never play your favorite song at the perfect volume at the exact moment you want to hear it, not only because that's just entirely stupid, but because we are awesomely fickle, slippery creatures, because organic systems are fluid and fluxive and can never be fully controlled or contained in a single vision, because to attempt same is to beg nature to explode all over us in a grand and glorious middle finger of, who the hell do you think you are?

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.

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